Musings on Travel and Entrepreneurship

Menu

Travelabulous is Not Dead

I was reading an old blog post from Paul Graham last week. The topic was, “How Not to Die.” Graham delivered the message as a speech at a Y-Combinator summer dinner back in 2007. Two sentences jumped out at me:

“For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don’t hear from you.
When we haven’t heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that’s a bad sign.”
– Paul Graham

Wow! It made me realize that we have been way too quiet. We have been communicating through our #lovetravel campaign on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+. Otherwise, we haven’t been saying much at all. This will change.

Does this mean we haven’t been busy? Not at all. We have been very busy.

As a quick recap, we came up with the idea in October of last year, incorporated in November, and have since gone through the two startup programs in Ottawa. We have been through the grant side of funding. We have refined our pitch dozens of times and have engaged with some great advisors in the process. We have designed what we believe to be a complete travel planning solution. We have created a development backlog. We have also created a fair amount of software and have some early validation on our recommendation experience and algorithm. This has been fun, but also a tonne of work.

Is this a good excuse to “not hear from us?” No. Will we get heard from more often? Yes, starting right now.

We will be doing a minor rebranding in the coming weeks. We will mix up our social postings and we will finally start to attract new lovers of travel and not just stockpile user content.

We are also ready to raise equity-based funding. This will get our message out there.

Where does this leave us? When we came up with the original idea, I was hoping for a January 2015 market release. Was this based on data? No. Now that 10 of 15 months have passed, do I feel like we are going to make that date? The only metrics that will help answer that question will be those associated with customer usage, but we are definitely trending in the right direction.

Again, although no one asked, Travelabulous is not dead. In fact, we are very much alive!